English

Heimlich Unheimlich is a screened, collaborative work consisting of visual collages, performed and displayed mixed genre texts (poetry, narrative, memoir, documentary), manipulations of image using the computer language MAX/MSP/Jitter, composed and improvised music, and vocal and instrumental sound samples. Heim in German means home, so Heimlich Unheimlich could translate loosely as Homely Unhomely. However, heimlich more usually means secretive or hidden while unheimlich means uncanny or weird, so the connotations of the two words can overlap. This relationship between heimlich and unheimlich (discussed in Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’) underlies the content of the piece. The piece uses the contrasting childhoods of two of the collaborators (the visual artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence and writer Hazel Smith) as a starting point. It focuses on two characters who have names related to forms of cloth that sometimes appear as body parts in the collages. One is Hessian, a German girl born towards the end of the second world war, whose father fought in the German army. She migrates with her family to Australia when she is still a child and eventually becomes an artist. The other is Muslin, a violinist and poet born to a Jewish family in England after the second world war, who migrates to Australia as an adult. Her family are preoccupied with preserving a Jewish ethnicity and avoiding antisemitism: they live in the shadow of the holocaust and are unforgiving of Nazi Germany. Both Muslin and Hessian are shaped by the cultural environments in which they grow up and both in some respects rebel against the constraints of those environments. Heimlich Unheimlich suggests strong crossovers between Muslin and Hessian, in particular intertwining and reconciling their different childhoods. It explores the inter-generational after effects of the Second World War (what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”) and the blending of personal and historical trauma. But the piece also engages with the relationship between autobiography and fiction, the dynamics of families and the enigma of family photographs, the significance of migration, the bonds of ethnic identity, the tension between natural and unnatural environments and the interplay between individualism and convergence that constitutes the collaborative process. The collages use photographs taken from family albums combined with many other visual images such as buildings, ruins, cemeteries, birds, musical notation, boats, flowers, feathers, bones and overlaid text. These collages are algorithmically organised so the order will be different each time the work is performed; split screens are used to juxtapose the changing relationships between the visual and the verbal. The computerised manipulation of the images results in their animation, segmentation and disintegration. Performed text and vocal samples are combined with written text, and different sets of musical materials are identified with Muslin or Hessian. The juxtapositions and transformations of text, image and sound create tensions between representation and abstraction, movement and stasis, continuity and discontinuity. These synergies reinforce the separate but blended identities of the protagonists and the broader social contexts from which they emerge. The work is presented in the form of a video. It combines the live audio recorded when austraLYSIS premiered the piece at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, in 2019 with a studio rendering of the image animation and montage. This represents only one version of the piece, others would be considerably different. The creators of the work are Hazel Smith (text), Sieglinde Karl-Spence (visual images) and Roger Dean (musical composition and image processing). The performers are Hazel Smith (text), Roger Dean (image processing), Sandy Evans, (saxophone), Phil Slater (trumpet) and Greg White (electronics). Claire Grocott and Claire Letitia Reynolds were technical assistants and collaborators in the making of the visual images. The photograph "Boar Lane, looking east,1951" is reproduced by kind permission of Leeds Libraries, www.leodis.net

Robopoem@s consist of five insect-like robots whose legs and bodies are engraved with the seven parts of a poem@ (“poema” in Spanish) written from the robot’s point of view in bilingual format (my original Spanish with English translations by Kristin Dykstra). Voice activation, micro-mp3 players, and response to sensors (reactive to obstacles) allow these quadrupeds to interact with humans and with each other, emphasizing the existential issues addressed in the poem. The final segment of the poem, number VII, re-phrases the biblical pronouncement on the creation of humans, as perceived by the robot: “According to your likeness / my Image.” With this statement, the notion of creation is reformulated and bent by the power of electronics, ultimately questioning its binary foundations.

"Código de barras" (Barcodes) was part of a collective exhibition titled "The Only Bush I Trust is my Own". The use of a barcode reader (an iSight) allowed the visitor in the gallery to reveal political and poetic messages against domestic violence, imperialism, consumerism, and informatic control. 

This short video work was filmed in New York in 2000 and involves a plastic owl reading Bill Joy's text Why the future doesn’t need us, published in Wired magazine in 2000. The text outlines a dystopian future where humans a rendered obsolete and are replaced by the sentient beings they created. The plastic owl hose sole purpose is to scare pigeons from the rooftop of the house in the west village spins whilst the words are whispered and the pigeons continue to go about their business paying no regard to it.

In a 1980 interview with David Remnick, John Ashbery describes the formative impact that the poetry of W. H. Auden had on his writing: “I am usually linked to Wallace Stevens, but it seems to me Auden played a greater role. He was the first modern poet I was able to read with pleasure…” In another interview Ashbery identifies Auden as “one of the writers who most formed my language as a poet.” For Auden’s part there was a mutual yet mysterious appreciation for the younger poet’s work; Auden awarded Ashbery the Younger Yale Poets prize for his collection “Some Trees”, with the caveat: “...that he had not understood a word of it.”

This web based exhibition presents a creative experiment using OpenAI’s GPT-2 and traditional recurrent neural networks to develop a generative poetry pipeline loosely modeled after this short narrative describing the dynamic between Ashbery, Auden, and Stevens. While this modeling is subjective and playful it aims to map the relationships between the three poets appropriately into different aspects of a machine learning framework. By exploring the potential of using social and personal relationships and the narratives they imply as inspirational structure for designing generative text pipelines and creating “Transformative Reading Interfaces” that explicate the relationships between the training corpora, the machine generated text, and the conceptualization of the artist.

The Hollow Reach is a choice-based virtual reality (vr) experience built on becoming posthuman to overcome the trauma of emotional and physical loss. What at first appears to be an adventure game turns out to be an exploration of psychological and physical recovery, not a retreat from reality but a coming to terms with it. In this interactive puzzle game, virtual reality offers a space of recuperation through adaptation and prostheses. In this piece, the player progresses from the human to the post-human only by letting go of their notions of what is and is not under their control to encounter a life augmented and transformed by the digital.

Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory that is currently unfolding over 40-ish posts on my Instagram feed (@kmustatea). It is a loose retelling of Dante’s Inferno, informed by the grim experience of wandering through NYC during a pandemic. Instead of the poet Virgil, my guide is a caustic hobo named Nikita. Voidopolis makes use of synthetic language, generated in this instance without the letter ‘e’ and the images are created by “wiping” humans from stock photography. The piece is meant to culminate in loss, so will eventually be deleted from my feed once the narrative is completed. By ultimately disappearing, this work makes a case for a collective amnesia that follows cataclysm.